Remote network management platforms may enable discovery, manipulation, and orchestration of devices, applications, and services on various types of private or public networks. Such a remote network management platform may store configuration items (also referred to as “CIs”) describing and/or relating to these devices, applications, and services in a configuration management database (CMDB) for example. Each configuration item can contain a number of attributes, such as a name, manufacturer, location, serial number, class, and so on. The class of a configuration item may determine the types of attributes that the configuration item contains.
The CMDB may support search operations in which a user can enter values of one or more configuration item attributes, and the CMDB may return a list of configuration items that have attributes with these values. But existing search functions may be unable to scale to the extent desired as the number of configuration items in the CMDB grows and/or the role that the remote network management platform takes on expands. For example, to find a particular list of configuration items, the user might be required to enter a very specific search query. Otherwise the query results may be quite long, requiring extensive manual review. In some cases, such a CMDB-centered search capability might not be able to narrow the number of configuration items returned.